Saturday, July 23, 2016

Will Pokemon Go and other AI/VR/AI apps kill the iFad (sorry iPad)?

iPad and
tablet sales have been falling sharply. In 2013 Apple’s head honcho, Tim Cook,
predicted that the iPad would overtake PC sales by 2015. He was way off, as sales
have fallen every quarter for two whole years, down 10% last year, across all
tablets.

iFad

I was never
enamoured by tablets and wrote extensively on how their massive procurement was
a disaster in secondary schools, FE and HE. I doubted their ability to enhance learning
and skills, especially as students moved on to long-form writing, coding,
graphics and so on. The procurement processes were pathetic but the pedagogic
arguments were worse, if they ever existed in the first place. In many cases, I
suspect, they inhibited learning.

Another
factor was the market, where smartphones simply adjusted screen size and extra
functionality to trounce tablets. Phablets are now the norm as screen sizes grew,
then shrank, but eventually settled on an optimally large-but-not-too-large
format. They cluster around a size that was just big enough to watch videos and
read long-form text, while still being pocketable. Even Apple increased the size of iPhones, as
they saw the threat. Inevitably, the smartphone won on power, size, convenience,
functionality and price.

Tablets aren’t killing laptops but smartphones
are killing tablets

I first
started to note this when my wife and sons simply switched over to their
larger phones or used laptops, while the iPad lay idle and unloved in the
corner. I don’t see that reversing. Can’t say I’m sorry. The iPad was always a
consumer not a producer device. It’s still odd to see people peck away like
chickens in meetings on iPads. If you want to write – get a laptop. And before
you say ‘attachable keyboard', simply turning a tablet into a laptop, makes it
precisely that – a laptop. iPads also suffer from functionality limitations –
not being able to run apps simultaneously. Nexus 7 tablet anyone? Nope. Google
killed it. In that sense, it was always something stuck between a proper
computer and a truly mobile device – neither a fast, sleek fish nor fully
mature fowl. Large-screen phones from the top and fast, productive, long-life
battery laptops from the bottom crushed it. Laptops and smartphones have the
legs, while tablets, increasingly, look like a passing iFad.

AR/VR/AI

Another set
of nails being hammered into the tablet coffin is AR/VR and AI. Don’t see many
folk poking around the streets playing Pokemon Go with tablets. We have entered
a new era, where mobility really does matter. Computing is being taken into the
real world. As the many layers of AR meld with RR (Real Reality), Pokemon Go
being the fist mass application, AR is here with a global bang.

VR on
mobiles through Google Cardboard has also caught the imagination. It is this
that will drive the VR market, with instantly downloadable experiences. Once
cameras on smartphones have 3D capture, it will fly. Smartphones democratized
comms and knowledge, VR democratizes experiences.

Beneath all
this is the massive, invisible hand of AI. Apple’s souped up voice and
messenger plans along with thousands of other AI inspired applications are
already making smartphones super-smart, with better personal security, better
interfaces, better functionality and better apps. The awkwardness of the
smartphone interface has given was to smartphones being really ‘smart’. The tablet era is over.